Bob Dylan quotes (about Robbie Robertson)

[Do you get any help from the group that you play with… that you write your songs…]
Robbie, the lead guitar player, sometimes we play the guitars together… something might come up… but I know it’s going to be right. I’ll be just sitting around playing so I can write up some words. I don’t get any ideas, though, any kind of ideas… of what I want to, you know, or what’s really going to happen here.
~San Francisco Press Conference, December 1965

the only mathematical guitar genius I’ve ever run into who does not offend my intestinal nervousness with his rearguard sound.
~ New York Herald Tribune, December 1965

It’s like I have to laugh at Robbie (the Band’s Robbie Robertson) in ‘The Last Waltz’ when he talks about giving up the road. It ain’t gonna happen. Once you’re on it, you’re on it…
~to Robert Hilburn, May 1978

The Band had their own sound, that’s for sure. When they were playin’ behind me, the weren’t the Band; they were called Levon and the Hawks. What came out on record as the Band – it was like night and day. Robbie [Robertson] started playing that real pinched, squeezed guitar sound – he had never played like that
before in his life. They could cover songs great. They used to do Motown songs, and that, to me, is when I think of them as being at their best. Even more so than “King Harvest” and “The Weight” and all of that. When I think of them, I think of them singin’ somethin’ like “Baby Don’t You Do It,” covering Marvin Gaye and that kind of thing. Those were the golden days of the Band, even more so than when they played behind me.
~to Kurt Loder, October 1987

Robbie Robertson quotes & video (about Bob Dylan)

And so when we did get the call from Bob Dylan, I felt embarrassingly unaware of what he did. There was kind of a folk thing happening, we knew about that — but it wasn’t on our agenda, really.
~From Somethingelsereviews.com

“I remember in some cases he played me some music and I didn’t care for it very much, but when he sang those songs or did those songs, I liked it. He also had a way of singing other people’s songs and making it sound like he wrote it, early on. Before I became a little bit more aware of different people’s songs in the folk music area. But I liked the idea that he had no idea what he had in mind — only that he wanted to just mix it up and try some stuff.”
~From Somethingelsereviews.com

In the case of Bob, he works really hard in figuring out songs. There is just no excuse for not giving it—if you love it that much—just giving it everything you can pull out.
~From taxi.com

Bob Dyan is as influential as any artist that there has been.
~From The Telegraph

Well, I have a different recollection of that song. That comes from when we were doing ‘The Basement Tapes’, so there was new songs, and Bob Dylan knows all of this stuff about folk music that we didn’t know. So every once in a while he would pull out one of these songs that we’d never heard of or heard before, and a couple of them that stuck out to me were ‘Spanish Is The Loving Tongue’ and ‘Ain’t No More Cane On The Brazos’. And when he sang that song, ‘Ain’t No More Cane On The Brazos’, I said, ‘Wait a minute, teach that song to me. There’s something special in that.’
~From clashmusic.com

I think that there are masters in most things. There are true masters and I think that Hank Williams is a true master. I think that he wrote and performed some songs and that he did better than anybody else in the world. I think that Bob Dylan is a true master.
~From huffingtonpost.com